Component Based Channel Assignment in Single Radio, Multichannel Ad Hoc Networks

To my mother, who has always been by side, during all the ups and downs in my life. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to thank my adviser Prof. Raghupathy Sivakumar for his unwavering guidance and motivation. His high standards in clear thinking and effective communication are inspiring and will always help me stand in good stead. The GNAN research group gave me the opportunity to work with a group of talented and hard-working students. I would like to acknowledge Ram, and Sriram for the valuable discussions which helped in every aspect of this work. I would also like to thank Yeonsik, and Yujie for their assistance and help. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my mother and my brother. I owe all my success to their love, support, sacrifice and encouragement. I can never thank them enough. SUMMARY In this work, we consider the channel assignment problem in single radio multi-channel mobile ad-hoc networks. Specifically, we investigate the granularity of channel assignment decisions that gives the best trade-off in terms of performance and complexity. We present a new granularity for channel assignment that we refer to as component level channel assignment. The strategy is relatively simple, and is characterized by several impressive practical advantages. We also show that the theoretical performance of the component based channel assignment strategy does not lag significantly behind the optimal possible performance, and perhaps more importantly we show that when coupled with its several practical advantages, it significantly outperforms other strategies under most network conditions.